ILLIAC I

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Memory drum of ILLIAC I, on display at the Spurlock Museum.
Urbana Illinois
, circa 1958.

The ILLIAC I (Illinois Automatic Computer), a pioneering

University of Illinois
, was the first computer built and owned entirely by a United States educational institution.

Computer

The project was the brainchild of Ralph Meagher and Abraham H. Taub, who both were associated with Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study before coming to the University of Illinois. The ILLIAC I became operational on September 1, 1952.[1][2] It was the second of two identical computers, the first of which was ORDVAC, also built at the University of Illinois. These two machines were the first pair of machines to run the same instruction set.

ILLIAC I was based on the

software compatibility. The computer had 2,800 vacuum tubes, measured 10 ft (3 m) by 2 ft (0.6 m) by 8½ ft (2.6 m) (L×B×H), and weighed 4,000 pounds (2.0 short tons; 1.8 t).[3] ILLIAC I was very powerful for its time; in 1956, it had more computing power than all of Bell Telephone Laboratories
.

Because the lifetime of the tubes within ILLIAC was about a year, the machine was shut down every day for "preventive maintenance" when older vacuum tubes would be replaced in order to increase reliability. Visiting scholars from Japan assisted in the design of the ILLIAC series of computers, and later developed the MUSASINO-1 computer in Japan. ILLIAC I was retired in 1962, when the ILLIAC II became operational.

Innovations

See also

References

  1. ISBN 0691023670
    .
  2. ISBN 9781483296685
    .
  3. ^ Weik, Martin H. (March 1961). "ILLIAC". www.ed-thelen.org. A Third Survey of Domestic Electronic Digital Computing Systems.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to ILLIAC I.
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